We're big fans of Backpack, the online PIM organizer with a pioneering KISS philosophy from the wildly successful 37signals. At times, however, Backpack can appear too simple, making it seem like the only way to interact with the service is through its pleasantly minimal web interface. Fortunately, this is entirely not so, and we just stumbled across two handy Firefox add-ons that bring quick navigation and easy clipping to this increasingly useful online info organizer.
First up is Backpack Pages, a simple toolbar button that acts as a simple drop-down bookmark menu for all your pages. As usually with any external Backpack tool, simply enter your username and private API key to get the ball rolling.
Second is a really useful add-on especially for users of Google Notebook or any other web clipping tool out there: Backpack Publish (pictured). Setup is again pretty standard, and now you can select text on any webpage and use this add-on's menu to create a List Item or Note to add to any of your pages without breaking your workflow.
If you're like most people, you probably have 5 or 10 websites, beside DownloadSquad, that you visit every day. But you've probably got dozens, if not hundreds of bookmarks cluttering up the bookmarks/favorites menu of your web browser.
That makes sense, because you want to bookmark pages you visit regularly, but not every day. And of course you bookmark pages you think you might come back to later, but never do.
The latest version of the Opera web browser has a nifty new feature that makes it easy to jump to your favorite pages. Every time you open a new tab, you're presented with 9 boxes with thumbnails of your favorite sites. You can either select sites yourself, or choose your most visited sites based on your browser history.
Each site is assigned a number, and you can automatically load each page by pressing Crtl+1, Crtl+2, etc. When you're on a blank tab, looking at the thumbnails, you can click Crtl+R to reload the images to see if anything changed while you were trying to decide which page to read first. This also handy because the thumbnails are not supposed to reload every time you start the browser (although in this initial release, they do).
Having issues syncing up your Blackberry to your Mac applications? PocketMac wants to save you with their latest release. PocketMac currently has a portfolio of products that help sync up various devices with Macs, and now its time to hook Blackberries up. PocketMac for Blackberry has a 2-way syncing ability that syncs up Entourage, Mac OSX Mail, Address Book, Tasks and iCal.
As for mobile browsing, PocketMac will transfer bookmarks in Safari over to the Blackberry browser. If you have a .Mac account, the PocketMac for Blackberry software will also sync your data online. PocketMac for Blackberry can be downloaded from the PocketMac website, and installed in just under three minutes.
Social bookmarking has taken off in a huge way, and nowadays we have more options than you can shake a mouse at. My personal favorite is del.icio.us, not simply because it was the first (or one of?), but more because of all the tools that hook in and provide access to my bookmarks. Delibar is a great Mac OS X utility that provides access from the menubar, and we also foundDeliwin that provides the same functionality for all y'all rolling with Windows. But for me, the killer feature is being able to call my bookmarks from the beauty of Quicksilver, my die-without-it, Mac OS X swiss army knife of an app launcher and file manipulator.
But enough about me - what say you, DLS readers? Did you leave del.icio.us in the dust months ago? Perhaps you prefer the more community-focused Ma.gnolia, or any of the other zillions of options that have arisen. Tell us what your favorite online bookmarking service is, and why, and we'll tally the results on Monday.
Get badged, by going to badged.net, where you can simply build a custom badge widget for your site or blog. The list of available badges you can include in your custom widget is pretty good:
Digg This Story
Sphere It
Add to Technorati Favorites
View Blog Reactions (via Technorati)
Add to del.icio.us
Add to Furl
Add to Netscape
Add to Yahoo! Myweb
Add to Google Bookmarks
Add to Newsvine
Add to Blinklist
Add to Reddit
Add to Blogmarks
Add to Magnolia
Add to Windows Live
Add to Tailrank
Add to Favorites (Internet Explorer)
Email This
You type in your site URL and name, check the boxes, and get the code at the bottom of the page. It could not be any easier to do and you can insert the whole thing at the bottom of your posts, your site, whatever. Sweet, slick, and fan-tas-tic. Here is what the actual badge I created looks like:
[Via The Global Geek Podcast]
When favicons first started to become popular, I have to admit that I didn't really "get" them. I couldn't see what the value was to having a dinky little icon in the address bar. Maybe I'm slow, but it also took me awhile to figure out that my browser could remember the favicon for my bookmarks or favorites that I'd visited, making it easier to pick them out from a long listing of links.
Of course, now that I'm used to them, I feel like I can't live without them. In fact, any listing of links that doesn't use favicons frustrates me, particularly if I use it a lot. One tool that I use a lot that unfortunately does not support favicons is del.icio.us. Of course, what do you do if there's something on the web that you wish was different? Well, if you're a programmer you just hack yourself together a greasemonkey script. And if you're like me, you just cross your fingers and hope that some kindly developer has hacked together a script to do what you were wishing you could do.
In my case, I'm happy to report that someone has in fact written a greasemonkey script to add favicons to del.icio.us. Creatively called fav.icio.us2, it does what it says it will do, and that's good enough for me.
Those Facebook social bookmarking features we told you about the other day? Well, the wait wasn't long and it seems that they're available to everybody now, even little ol' me. Facebook, of course, isn't calling it social bookmarking, they're calling it "Sharing." There's now a "My Shares" link in the left-hand sidebar, and there's little "Share" buttons all over the site--next to photos, people's profiles, and items other people have shared. When you share an item you can choose to put it on your profile or share it with specific people, or both.
When you share something with another Facebook user, it shows up in their right sidebar, not in their News Feed, which will be a relief to those who were afraid of overzealous linkers (or those with dreams of "free" iPods) spamming things up. Like events, you can enter someone's e-mail address if they don't have a Facebook account, but they have to register for an account before they can see what you've shared. There is, naturally, a bookmarklet that you can use to share links from across the web, as well as MP3s and videos from YouTube and Google Video.
Overall, I think Facebook's new Sharing features are well-implemented and well-thought out. They don't get in the way, it's easy to control who you share with and easier still to manage items. I really wish MP3s had an embedded player like videos do, but you can't win 'em all. Look after the jump for a bunch of screenshots of it in action.
For those of us that are regular users of MyWeb, this list will look awfully familiar - it reads like a decent enhancement of the 'social bookmarking for the masses' service that's been out for a while now.
However, the post from the team mentions this:
"Yahoo! Bookmarks will focus on personal saving, organization, and recovery while our comrades at del.icio.us will concentrate on meeting your social bookmarking and sharing needs. For users of MyWeb, your bookmarks are safe, and in a few months you'll be able to roll over to either Yahoo! Bookmarks or del.icio.us."
I'm not sure how I feel about this - I use both MyWeb and del.icio.us, and MyWeb is clearly the easier of the 2 (especially with the integration of Yahoo 360). That said, I am happy that they have thrown their support over the acquisition as it matures.
More details and screenshots can be found on Techcrunch. If you want to try it yourself, it's available here...
Sometimes finding a download turns out to be a homecoming of sorts. AM-DeadLink is like a long-lost friend. I used it regularly on a machine I had at least 5 years ago, then lost track of it for some reason in an intervening system upgrade. Luckily, it's still around, and appears to be being actively developed.
AM-DeadLink does everything you would expect a bookmark validator to do - it tells you when your bookmarks have, for want of a better term, expired, and also lets you know which ones are redirecting, and may need to be updated, and will find duplicate entries that can be deleted. An added feature is that AM-DeadLink can update all of the favicons as it hits each server to check if it's still there. These updated favicons can be saved right into your bookmarks or favorites, so that the next time you look at your list of bookmarks, it's a little more visually interesting.
AM-DeadLink is compatible with Internet Explorer, Firefox, Mozilla and Opera bookmarks, as well as comma-separated or tab-separated text files of links.
Isn't del.icio.us already a social-ish network? I know it is no MySpace, and MySpace is shining example of, which isn't quite MySpace either, but it would be good to get more social features onto del.icio.us such as groups, interests, maybe a related-links section would be useful, and who knows what else those guys will come up with. All I am saying is keep a sharp eye out for del.icio.us to make things a bit more "so, what do you do Phil" than "here are the bookmarks you requested." Smooth times.
Google Notebook, the Ajaxy bookmarking app I praised when it launched back in May, has taken a cue from Writely and Google Spreadsheets and added collaboration features. Whereas previously sharing was limited to letting others view your Notebook, it is now possible to invite other people to add to and modify your Notebook. This could be ideal for group research projects, trip planning--basically any situation in which several people are all collecting information online for a single purpose.
In addition to collaboration, Google Notebook has a couple other minor new features, including improved drag and drop support, Trash and undo (so when you accidentally delete something, it's not actually gone), and a Notebook gadget for Google Personalized Home. As always, I'm relieved to see Google is still developing this project instead of leaving it to gather dust.
HiveLive is an online application designed to keep track of busy lifestyles.
HiveLive is currently in beta form, and offered by invitation only. Which is a real drag, since this could be a useful online application for a ton of people. I have had the chance to play around with HiveLive for a bit, and think it's a pretty useful application. Not a lot is said about this application on the front page other then it's great for families, friends, clubs, small businesses, bands, etc., and that it's an easy way to keep track and share important information.
Through HiveLive you can store notes, bookmarks, account numbers or anything that you want to remember. Storing it on HiveLive gives you have access to it anywhere you have an internet connection. When you send an invitation to other people, you can create Hives of information that you can share between users. These hives can be public or private, only accessible to those that you wish to enter and share information with. It takes a little bit of figuring out how the system works, but it seems pretty useful with its clean and well organized interface.
If you are interested in trying out this tool, Solutionwatch has some invites to give away.
UPDATE: Carlos from HiveLive has been so kind as to make 100 free user accounts available for readers of DownloadSquad. Visit http://hivelive.com/join/downloadsquad to sign up now! Thanks Carlos!
Think you could do better than del.icio.us, Furl, and Yahoo! My Web? Well, now's your chance: Scuttle is an open source social bookmarking engine that you can run on your own site. It's based on PHP and supports most of the del.icio.us protocol, meaning developers who have made tools for del.icio.us can easily adapt them to Scuttle. Unfortunately there's no unified feature list for Scuttle, but you can see it in action at Scuttle.org. If you want to get started on your own social bookmarking site right away, you can download Scuttle's source code at SourceForge.
Social bookmarking has taken off in a huge way, and nowadays we have more options than you can shake a mouse at. My personal favorite is del.icio.us, not simply because it was the first (or one of?), but more because of all the tools that hook in and provide access to my bookmarks. 
When you share something with another Facebook user, it shows up in their right sidebar, not in their News Feed, which will be a relief to those who were afraid of overzealous linkers (or those with dreams of "free" iPods) spamming things up. Like events, you can enter someone's e-mail address if they don't have a Facebook account, but they have to register for an account before they can see what you've shared. There is, naturally, a bookmarklet that you can use to share links from across the web, as well as MP3s and videos from YouTube and Google Video.
